Kevin White, the Feds, and the press

Some
thoughts are dashing around in my mind about a topic that thus far has gotten
little play in the aftermath of Kevin White's death. Since the Phoenix did so much of
the best reporting on the White political era, I figured I'd post my thoughts
on the website.

Little
has been said about the role the press played in keeping Kevin White from
running for a fifth term as mayor, and in keeping him from moving into
national politics. A little (too little) has been said about Bill Weld's role,
but almost nothing has been said or written about the press' role. How can this
be ignored so? Can it be because the press played such an ignoble role in
driving White to make his decision not to run and would prefer not to dredge it
up? Maybe it's the desire not to speak ill of the dead. Maybe the fact that
there are few journalists working today who actually remember those days. But
whatever the reason, the lack of coverage seems odd. History, even if nothing else, requires some mention.

Ted Anzalone was investigated, then indicted, for
several cash transactions as well as one more serious charge - that he joined a
lower-level city hall operative named George Collatos, who had a history of
shady dealings, in extorting cash from a private businessman who did (and
wanted to continue doing) business with the city of Boston. When
I began my representation of Anzalone, I started to follow the press coverage
very carefully, especially the coverage of the sprawling federal investigation (it often was really more jihad
than legitimate criminal investigation) by The Boston Globe and The
New York Times (then separately owned newspapers). From time to time, I
took very serious issue with the coverage by, especially, Marty Nolan (but also
several others) in the Globe and Fox Butterfield in the Times. I realized that both Nolan and
Butterfield must have been
getting a lot of their stuff - much of it utterly incorrect factually and
legally - from the politically ambitious press orchestrator Bill Weld or his minions.

I
recall sending various letters and some
supporting documents and other materials to Butterfield, Nolan and
other members of the Fourth Estate to protest the skewed and inaccurate coverage
in their respective papers. One occasion in particular sticks in my mind and in
my craw. A story emerged that Joanne Prevost Anzalone, Ted's wife, had
purchased a townhouse or some such building from the City of Boston for the
crony-special sum of one dollar! As Ted's lawyer, I knew a lot about the
financial affairs of both Joanne ("Joie") and Ted, and I knew this to be
nonsense. Joie paid fair market value for the townhouse. I did some
investigation and realized where the story came from. Someone must have dropped
a dime to the effect that on the legal document transferring the property from
the city into Joie's name, it used the phrase "for one dollar and other good
and valuable consideration." What the media did not understand was that this
was an ancient phrase used in most such legal documents, especially real estate contracts and deeds; it did not reflect
the actual purchase price. The
"one dollar" was a legal construct, a legal fiction, meant to connote that
money was paid for the property. One finds this language in myriad such real
estate sale documents and deeds. Yet a media storm erupted that the city had
facilitated the sale of a valuable property to the Anzalone family for a
dollar!

So
I sent numerous documents to both the Globe
and to Butterfield at the Times.
I accompanied it with a pretty harsh cover letter about the media's fawning
(toward Weld) and vicious (toward the Anzalones and White) inaccurate coverage of the whole
investigation. I recall the result of my troubles: Marty Nolan didn't talk to
me for years afterwards. Fox Butterfield, to his credit, became curious and
took me to lunch at Maison Robert (the French restaurant then-located in the
Old City Hall across from the Parker House) and allowed me to vent on his
terrible coverage and his allowing himself and his newspaper to be pawns of
Bill Weld's political ambitions. (I
recall bringing with me to that upscale restaurant a large stack of papers and
documents and plunking them down on the table.) Still, however, the Globe and the Times vied with one another for the dubious privilege of running
the Government's propaganda line
purveyed to a voracious press and a gullible public by an ambitious pol.

I
did finally allow one media request for a face-to-face interview of Ted
Anzalone while he was still in legal jeopardy. (I don't remember the stage of
the case, but it was before he won both the money-laundering and the extortion
cases.) (See pp. 14-27 of my book Three
Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent for a reminder of what
the prosecutions were about and how the Weld team acted - badly!) That
interview was conducted by Ric Kahn and appeared on the front page of The Boston Phoenix in the mid-1980s
sometime. Kahn also wrote a later piece in the Phoenix issue of September 24, 1985 ("To Catch a Liar")
recounting the tale of how the feds were shamed into prosecuting their chief
witness in the extortion trial against Anzalone, a low level City Hall
operative named George Collatos.
The charge against Collatos was for perjury committed on the witness stand at
the trial in which Weld's boys were trying to convince a jury, on the basis of
Collatos' testimony, that Anzalone worked with Collatos to extort money from a
city contractor. What did Collatos lie about? Well, during the weeks leading up
to Anzalone's extortion trial, Collatos met with Anzalone and threatened that
unless Anzalone got Kevin White to fork over big bucks to Collatos, Collatos
would lie at Anzalone's
upcoming extortion trial and tell the jury that Anzalone extorted money from
city contractors. But in exchange for a big payoff, Collatos told Anzalone, he
would tell the truth - that Anzalone did not engage in the extortion
being charged in Anzalone's indictment. Collatos' perjurious testimony at
Anzalone's trial blew up in his and the prosecutors' faces, as recounted by Kahn's Phoenix piece. And so Weld's team, publicly embarrassed, felt
pressured to prosecute Collatos for perjury. (Interestingly, this was Collatos'
second perjury trial. His first occurred years earlier, and while in
prison serving his sentence for perjury he decided to become a government
witness against Anzalone, the pathway to a get-out-of-jail-free card then, and
now.) The press seemingly never did catch on to the dangers inherent in this
Department of Justice method for getting and grooming witnesses. They can get a
vulnerable witness to say just about anything. These prosecutorial tactics are
seen as somehow necessary for fighting crime and corruption. In truth, these
tactics should
be deemed criminal and corrupt -
and, indeed, they would be prosecuted as felonies if engaged in by a defense
lawyer.

In
any event, the major news media did not do truth and justice any service in
piling onto Kevin White and Ted Anzalone. The combination of the feds and the
media wrecked Anzalone's law practice (he never returned to it after he won his
criminal cases) and wrecked Kevin White's political career. In fact, one may
recall that when White left City Hall after pressure from the feds and the news
media caused him to decline another run for the mayoralty, he went to Boston University
to a teaching perch, hired by then-BU President John Silber. As soon as that
job was announced, Weld's boys subpoenaed Silber to the grand jury that was
still hunting for the Great White, to ask Silber whether the post-mayoralty job
given by BU/Silber to Kevin White was a pre-agreed payback by BU for White's
having facilitated, while mayor, the sale (at a low price) of a city-owned building
(it was the Armory on Commonwealth Avenue, I believe) to BU. Obviously, if
Mayor White had engineered such a sale-on-the-cheap in exchange for the promise
of a post-mayoralty job, it would be fodder for a bribery/extortion case.
(Vague memory tells me Silber was not a happy camper at being used this way to
further Weld's ambitions.) In any event, Silber reportedly gave the grand jury
and the feds a few words to remember him by, and this final effort to "get"
White was closed down with no indictments.

Weld
went on to a post at the Department of Justice and the governorship; White
retired from political life and taught at BU for the rest of his career.
Anzalone never returned to the practice of law. The Globe and the Times
went on to cover the next victims of the feds, and, with little critical
thought nor attention paid to that hallowed concept of "balance," continued to
do the feds' bidding. (The uncritical press coverage of federal prosecutors
remains stuck in my craw. I love many things about the Globe and the Times;
I am a loyal reader of the newsprint editions of both papers; but they still do
a terrible job of reporting what federal prosecutors really do and how they "make" their criminal cases - some
involving true crime, but too many involving innocent victims of unsavory
prosecutorial tactics that distort
rather than uncover truth.)

Let
me tell one more story that has
too long gone unreported: Toward the beginning of the grand jury investigation
focusing on White, lawyers for the various political players started to meet
once a week, at the Parkman House, to discuss the investigation, to trade
information, to compare notes, and to help one another strategize. One day one
of the members of our group of lawyers reported to the group that he had gotten
a phone call from someone at the U.S. Attorney's office saying that Weld's
office learned about these weekly meetings and considered them to be improper, perhaps even a conspiracy to
obstruct justice! Weld's office was never too subtle in its inability, or
unwillingness, to draw a distinction between legitimate defense tactics and
strategies on the one hand, and criminal obstruction of justice on the other.
Obstruction of Weld's ambitions, after all, did not equate with obstruction of justice.
Our lawyers' group continued to meet.

A
similar incident occurred during Anzalone's extortion trial. As I noted above,
we were able to prove at the trial that the government's chief witness, George
Collatos, had threatened Anzalone that he would lie at the trial, and would
claim that Anzalone extorted a contractor, unless White paid a large bribe to Collatos. We proved this because we secreted
two witnesses in the basement of the restaurant where Collatos made the threat
to Anzalone. When the prosecutors learned of this the day before we were
scheduled to produce in the trial
courtroom our two eavesdropping witnesses who overheard Collatos'
threat, they went ballistic. That night, FBI agents visited the homes of our
two witnesses and threatened that if they testified, they would expose
themselves to indictment for an ancient common law and federal crime called
"misprision of a felony" because they had witnessed a federal felony -
extortion committed by the government's own witness! - and did not report it to
law enforcement authorities! After the court proceedings the following day,
when the Feds' lead witness got exposed and devastated, it was not our defense
witnesses who were in the hot seat. The press dutifully reported all of these
events, as they had to since they occurred in open court, but somehow the
deeper lessons of the prosecution were not learned by the press, except for
Kahn's insightful coverage in the Phoenix.
The papers still, with very rare exceptions (the Whitey Bulger escapades being
one of those exceptions), give fawning and essentially uncritical coverage to
federal prosecutions and the fundamentally corrupt techniques by which such
prosecutions are built.

The
feds' plan for turning Anzalone into a witness against White is recounted in Three Felonies a Day. It was an
entirely dishonest and shameful campaign. In fact, after Anzalone had won
both his criminal cases, I expected that he would receive a grand jury
subpoena, finally, to tell all he knew about White. That subpoena never
arrived. Why? Well, could it be because, without Anzalone facing a long prison
sentence, Weld's office no longer had the leverage over him to teach him, in
the phrase immortalized by my friend and former law school teacher Alan
Dershowitz, "not only how to sing, but also how to compose"?

The
Weld campaign against Kevin White, especially that aspect of it that planned to
use Ted Anzalone as a tool, wrecked both men's aspirations. The newspapers,
that until the very end assumed, without evidence, that White was corrupt and
that Anzalone was his bag-man, never apologized. They just went on to the next
victim.

This is what comes to my
mind as I think about the death of Kevin H. White. White did a Hell of a
lot more for democracy and decency, and civic life, than the U.S. Attorney's
office. May Kevin White Rest-in-Peace.